Salvation

Salvation as a Process in Time

All the way through the Scriptures, salvation is
something that God has done, is doing and will do. Likewise, salvation at
a personal level is something secured in a past event, appropriated now by
us and worked towards in God’s future. In each of the three temporal
stages, past, present and future, God, and He alone, saves. Nonetheless,
in each of these three stages, salvation comes by faith and an active
participation of our wills. This constitutes a "virtuous circle"
as we grow stronger for God by His grace. His salvation takes root in our
lives and grows according to our capacity to receive it.

We shall have more to say about the cooperation or
synergy of wills between God and Man in the last study. In this session we
shall look at the spatial and temporal dimensions of salvation.

In the ministry of Christ in His Incarnation the
Kingdom of God was both breaking through into this realm and moving toward
a denouement that was yet to come. So Jesus stated quite explicitly that
the Kingdom was present in and through His work: -

"But if I cast out demons with the finger of
God, surely the Kingdom of God has come upon you." [Luke 11:20]

He also called his hearers to discover the Kingdom as a
present reality within them: -

"The Kingdom of God does not come with
observation, nor will they say: ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For
indeed, the Kingdom of God is within you." [Luke 11:21]

Nonetheless, Jesus also taught that the Kingdom of God
was yet to come and for this coming his friends must pray with all fervour
and faith: -

" … Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on
earth as it is in heaven …" [Lord’s Prayer]

The coming Kingdom was to be likened to a Messianic
Banquet or a Wedding Feast to which the Bridegroom would come and preside,
[Matthew 8:11; Luke 13:28-29]. This feast is anticipated in the Eucharist,
a foretaste of the table of Christ in this coming Kingdom, [Luke
22:29-30]. From an Easter perspective the Eucharist proclaims the saving
death of Christ "until He comes," [1 Corinthians 11:26].

Since the presence of the Kingdom of God is the
saving work of Christ, its past, present and future reality are all one.
However, we are all creatures in space and time and we cannot behave
therefore as if our present location and context had no meaning. Unless we
lay hold of Him who at one particular time embraced us we shall surrender
our future promise as children of God. The Scriptures firmly teach that we
must believe, trust, work, persevere, and "endure to the end" if
we would be saved, [Mark 13:13].

All of this is the work of God and yet we do not
benefit unless we actively lay hold of it, and not just once but
continuously and at a deeper and deeper level. The detailed working out of
salvation as an ongoing process in the Church is given to us by St. Paul.
He gives perhaps the clearest expression of this salvation process in an
autobiographical comment in his letter to the Church at Philippi: -

3:7: But what things were gain to me, these I
counted loss for Christ.

3:8: Yet indeed I also count all things but loss for
the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have
suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, (literally
"dung"), that I may win Christ,

3:9: And be found in him, not having my own
righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through faith in
Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith:

3:10: That I may know him, and the power of his
resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming conformed to
his death;

3:11: If by any means I might attain to the
resurrection of the dead.

3:12: Not that I have already attained, or am already
perfected: but I press on that I may lay hold of that for which Christ
Jesus has also laid hold of me.

3:13: Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended:
but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching
forward to those things which are ahead,

3:14: I press toward the goal for the prize of the
upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Here in St. Paul we find salvation in all of its
three temporal modes. As a pious and blameless Jew He was blameless
according to the Law but only came to know salvation at his conversion on
the Damascus road. His walk with God was therefore firmly rooted in his
own experience and faith at that key turning point when he trusted in the
power of Christ’s cross and resurrection rather than his own zeal for
the Law that could not save him. In verse 10, he moves on to the present
where he prays that he might know Christ, the power of his resurrection
and the fellowship of his sufferings. Did not St. Paul know of these
already? Of course he did! But he prayed he might daily grow in them
daily. Salvation once acquired, (justification), must develop and grow
more deeply within our lives bringing that holiness, (sanctification),
without which the resurrection will forever remain ever beyond our grasp,
(verse 11). St. Paul is conscious that he must move forward by grace
toward his goal, (glorification). Salvation is not just what happened many
years ago when we came to know Christ, it’s how that is worked out here
and now as we strain forward by faith into God’s future from whence the
fullness of salvation - resurrection, glorification, will come.

So much else in St. Paul’s writings emphasises this
truth concerning salvation as a process in time, the work of God and the
response of Man. His consistent theme is that the fullness of salvation
awaits us in God’s future, in the "day of the Lord Jesus," [1
Corinthians 5:5]. We are to await the coming of our Saviour from heaven,
[Philippians 3:20], and we are to be saved by hope, [Romans 8:24]. We are
called to "work out our (your) own salvation with fear and
trembling." [Philippians 2:12b].

Nothing St. Paul or any other New Testament wrote
teaches that the saving action of God in the Incarnation, Life, Death and
Resurrection of Christ is a "one-off" event fixed at an isolated
moment of time both in history and in the life of a believer such that he
or she can look back and say: - "at this time I was saved."
Nothing in the New Testament allows us to separate justification,
sanctification and glorification and apply salvation only to the first. As
Bishop Maximos Aghiorgoussis says: -

"Justification is not a separate act of God but
the negative aspect of salvation in Christ, which is freedom from sin,
death and the devil; whereas sanctification is the positive aspect of God’s
saving act, that of spiritual growth in new life in Christ communicated by
God’s Holy Spirit."

Believing upon these things rightly is vitally
important for dire consequences follow from trying to locate salvation
only in the past. The most dangerous fruit of this wrong belief is
spiritual arrogance. Sometimes those who wax the most lyrical about
salvation being something that only God has done once and for all in their
lives at a particular time in the past go on to say, quite logically but
wrongly, that this salvation cannot be lost. How can it be lost? If it’s
all "done and dusted" in the past by God and Him alone, to
suggest otherwise would be to compromise God’s almighty power and this,
of course, is impossible. This heresy arises from denying the ongoing
reality and role of our wills in the working out of our salvation
throughout our lives. The practical result of this error is that nothing I
can do now can prejudice a salvation that is firmly locked into my past
and the sole action of God in saving me. The truth of our Orthodox faith,
however, is that I can indeed lose my future salvation by refusing the
present struggle that should be going on in my life right now for
sanctification and truth, a saving faith which is changing me not once and
for all but, as then, so now and for ever. Anything else is laziness and
conceit.

As surely as many Christians err in not seeing
salvation as a temporal process, so also do they err in seeing it as
something that only concerns the individual soul. No one is saved alone.
The Church does not exist merely as an assembly of the saints, already
saved and merely needing a bit of mutual encouragement and empowerment.
The body of Christ (Church) into which we are baptised is a school for
sinners and all of us learn and receive salvation together. Moreover, my
salvation is tied up with yours for salvation can be nothing other than a
manifestation of the Love of God for all men. This also of course is the
basis of the Church’s social teaching. If salvation is not wide enough
to encompass the whole of humankind’s life socially and personally then
the neglected elements just get politicised by alien ideologies and then
secularised so that only the private domain remains sacred, and finally,
not even that. This is a gross violation of our responsibility toward for
the whole of the created order. Orthodoxy knows of no selfish interiority
masquerading as Christian piety. As St. Basil the Great reminds us: -

" … who does not know, that the human animal
is tame and social, not solitary and wild? For nothing is so
characteristic of our nature as to communicate with one another, and to
need one another, and to love our kind." [St. Basil the Great:
"The Longer Rules" 3:1]